T10 healing set changes on the PTR

March 3, 2010

Well well well, the current PTR patch notes describe a change to the 4 piece T10 heal set bonus…

Priest Tier-10 4-Piece Healing Set

Bonus: Redesigned. This bonus now increases the effectiveness of the caster’s Power Word: Shield and Renew spells by 5%.

This replaces the FH procced timer reset for Penance and CoH, which had the problems of only being good for specific roles and playstyles within each spec as well as being excessively RNG based. When it procced a lot, it added a ton of healing, but when it didn’t proc it was worthless.

Additionally the playstyles it benefitted are ones that the encounter design of ICC is encouraging priests to moved away from. Holy priests are generally pushed to use renew over FH for raid healing, and with the current popularity of Holy Paladins (them being so far ahead of the pack regarding tank healing) Disc priests are generally taking the raid shieldbot role. The old 4 piece bonus was just not enough (or not reliable enough) to make casting FH preferable to Renew for Holy, or make Disc competitive with Paladins for tank healing.

With this info coming the day after I laid out another 60 emblems on the off-set gloves, completing my off-set emblem purchases, I’m obviously thrilled at the awesome timing. Now I need to work out whether it’s worth buying the healing tier or stick to my plan of picking up some shadow tier for the off-spec.

The 5% bonus to PW:S is certainly tempting. We’ve got no other scaling for that except spellpower, and 5% will make a significant difference.

The other thing that might swing it for me is the news about cataclysm stat changes.

Healers, and I have to spuriously assume that this includes Disc, will be getting their regen from Spirit. DPS will regen via unspecified other mechanisms. Currently Disc has little use for Spirit, which could lead to a situation where priests who have shunned it in favour of haste + crit items find their regen suddenly gutted when the stat changes are rolled out live. The T10 set though is dripping in spirit with lots on each piece.

I certainly don’t want to find myself gimped for the release of Cataclysm. For now I’ll be banking the tokens until the regen situation for Disc priests is clarified.

I love the sound of the new changes, but I’m under the assumption that when Cataclysm drops there will be bigger and better gear, making our current T-10 worthless in raids. This just sounds like something Blizz should have done in the first place, and now that everybody has avoided getting T-10 gear for ICC, they have to gear up yet again to get the bonuses. Thank you Blizz for forever keeping me on “farm” mode :P